Thursday, December 21, 2006

And I've also put together the first rendered movie. It doesn't look like much but it's all rendered movies (as opposed to stills). The pipe is working except from a couple of shots which I set up wrongly (been corrected today). Click here to see it (approx 140 megs).

I've also started to animate the first shot (sh00). You can see/download an XSI capture by clicking here.

I've found another rig design bug today which I'm trying to correct (easier said then done). For some weird reason I put the head as IK (position controller) but I like it to be FK (rotation controller) instead. It's much easier to work with rotation when editing F-curves.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Spent most of yesterday and today setting up all the shots (render passes and FX-trees, shot lengths and compositions). It's done. It's rendering. And tomorrow I'll post the first rendered version of the movie. I'm very impressed by how stable MentalRay is.

Today I've spent most of the day doing faces for Pablo and to do test animations. There's a lot of details in the rig design you come to think of when starting to animate. For example, I like when positioning of hands and elbow direction isn't affected by, for example, the belly's direction - I like them to be "global". Same goes for knee direction. I'm glad I spent the day doing that - rather now than later.

I've also constructed a MarkingSet for Pablo's animatable parameters and I scripted some tools to easier key the characters.

Monday, December 18, 2006

The batch system is up and running and hopefully I'll have all shots set up for rendering by tomorrow afternoon and the result automatically uploaded to the blog every night.

Now I can select to render everything or just what has been updated. When the rendering is done all shots are put together in AE. And then it should be uploaded to the blog. I can also change some global parameters such as resolution and aspect ratio. I can also choose different ways to put together the shots.

Went through the S1 and made something that looks like an X-Sheet. Click here to view. I use this to have control over the different shots. As you can see in the bottom of the list, I'll use shorter clips for the typewriter-bashing-part and arrange them in post. Also, many shots lack a z-buffer as I'll create a focus effect in post by blurring the background layer. All to decrease rendering time.